It was the month of February and good sleighing
He is not one to believe in the vampire superstition
Mary Eliza died in December. Seven months later, her daughter and namesake, Mary Olive, joined her. It would be another few years before the disease took hold of her two remaining children. Now 19, Mercy Lena was handed her own death sentence. Her case of was the “galloping” sort, which mercifully took her quickly. Brother Edwin was diagnosed at roughly the same time, though his was slower to take hold.
A miserable disease regardless of the variety, consumption is punctuated by fitful coughing, fever and night sweats. Though not as contagious as the cold or flu, it’s spread in the same manner, through coughing and sneezing during prolonged exposure to the infected person. Over the course of less than a decade, it had wiped out the entire Brown clan, save for the patriarch, George, and his only son.
Edwin’s skin had turned a pallid shade. He lost his appetite and became weak. Having watched the disease end the lives of three family members, it seemed clear to George how things were going to play out with his only son. Though unlike Mercy, his elder sibling by a year, Edwin’s case presented a glimmer of hope – enough, at least, for him to be sent off to Colorado, in hopes of recovering in the mountain air. His symptoms ultimately persisted, however, and he was sent back home to New England.
It was the Exeter town folk who suggested a remedy far more dramatic than a simple change of scenery.
Two-hundred years prior and 40 miles southeast of their New Hampshire home, the town of Salem, Massachusetts held the last in a series of trials that led to the hanging of 14 women and five men over the course 15 months. Five more died in jail and another, who refused to plea, was pressed to death.
"Such was the darkness of that day,” John Hale, a minister who had sat through many of the proceedings, wrote in a posthumously published book, “the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.”
It wasn’t witch panic that gripped Exeter at the close of the 19th century, but it was, certainly, a clear indication that not everyone had internalized the hard learned lessons of Salem. Theirs was a problem with vampires. It was a theory that required action, and the villagers were ultimately able to convince George to exhume his family in search of an answer.
The grisly event made The Providence Journal front page two days later, under the headline, “Exhumed Bodies -- Testing a Horrible Superstition in the Town of Exeter. Bodies of Dead Relatives Taken From Their Graves. They Had All Died of Consumption, and the Belief Was That Live Flesh and Blood Would Be Found That Fed Upon the Bodies of the Living.”
Another, longer article followed, this time offering the account of Harold Metcalf, the district’s medical examiner. A learned man and a skeptic, the doctor would prove perfect vessel for reporting that made no attempt to mask is disgust with the entire undertaking.
“He is not one to believe in the vampire superstition,” The Journal noted. “He spent too long a time on the hospital aid wagons which are sent into the New York streets from Bellevue, to believe in anything relating to the human body which cannot be proven by the ordinary methods of medical science. He was called into the affair because he was the best physician nearest to Exeter and examined the bodies because he was paid to do it. He in fact discouraged the suggestion and affirmed that the result would be futile.”
By the time Metcalf arrived at Shrub Hill Cemetery on Wednesday morning, four men had already recovered the bodies. Opening the first coffin revealed Mary Eliza in a mummified state, with some muscle and flesh still intact. Mary Olive had decomposed far more rapidly and was now little more than skeleton and hair. Two months after being buried, Mercy Lena was removed from the tomb. The most recent death by several years, her body predictably exhibited the fewest signs of decay.
Her heart and liver were removed from her body, the former still displaying signs of blood. Metcalf explained that such a phenomenon was not uncommon – in fact, her burial in an above ground tomb through the cold New England winter almost certainly contributed to her preserved state.
The other men assembled didn’t listen, insisting that the middle child was a vampire. It was she who had inflicted her younger brother with consumption. They quickly set out burning the organs, which the ailing Edwin was made to ingest.
The consumption would take him two months later.
Mercy Lena Brown was the last of seven documented cases of vampire panic spurred on by tuberculosis outbreaks over the course of 100 years. “Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton,” a local history noted of the first incident, which occurred in Woodstock, Vermont. “It was the month of February and good sleighing. Such was the excitement that from five hundred to one thousand people were present. This account was furnished me by an eye witness of the transaction.”
Thirty-three years before Mercy Brown’s death Henry David Thoreau noted the story of another Vermont incident. "The savage in man is never quite eradicate,” he wrote in his journal. “I have just read of a family in Vermont — who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs & heart & liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”
Sources:
Food for the Dead by Michael E. Bell
A History of Vampires in New England by Thomas D'Agostino
The Great New England Vampire Panic https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic-36482878/